a short case study into funny internet history: reverse-bimbofication
This is my favorite screenshot of all time. The time stamps on it are ridiculously out of date because, as of writing, I have been holding on to this screenshot for almost 10 years.
To explain how we got here, I need to explain transformation porn. It's very a very simple concept: porn of one thing transforming into another thing. Got it? Got it.
A very popular sub-genre of transformation porn is bimbofication: A normal person (sometimes male, sometimes female) is transformed into a hypersexualized, sex-crazed caricature of a woman known as the bimbo, who has no thoughts in her head except dick and where she will next get it.
These are both niche interests with small fetish communities around them. Until one fateful day.
One day, an artist who regularly makes bimbofication art receives a commission: Instead of drawing a normal person transforming into a sex-crazed bimbo, what if you instead drew a bimbo transforming into a normal person?
"How novel!" thinks the artist, "this will be fun and cool, getting to work on a variation of what I normally do. I will get straight to work on this right away."
The following piece of artwork is created:
There is a very good chance you recognize this image. If you do, you already know the second half of the story. For those of you who do not, I will continue.
Somehow, and I am not aware exactly when, where, or how, this image becomes divorced from its fetish context. And from there, it spreads over the internet like wildfire.
People are not interpreting it as fetish art. Most people, by definition, are normies, and are oblivious to even the possibility that this is actually porn.
They are interpreting it as a political cartoon.
And everyone has an opinion.
People are scrambling either to dunk on the obvious misogynistic and racist themes of the piece, or to defend it, saying that it's only about valuing knowledge over superficiality.
And one of the funnier (if not funniest) parts of this controversy is that the original artist agrees that the meaning being read into it is misogynistic and offensive.
So EVERYBODY on the internet is either scrambling to defend an artist who does not agree with them and does not want to be defended, or else to attack somebody who agrees with them.
To go back briefly to the screenshot at the top of the post, I need you to be aware that this interaction was only ONE in a FLOOD of interactions like this.
And the internet being what it is, several variations spring up. As well as people shipping the women in it, obviously.